It probably isn’t politically correct, but Pistol Patent Day honors when Samuel Colt received his patent for the first revolver.

So let’s talk about Sam. Like a lot of inventors, he tried a lot of things before he succeeded.

He was born in 1814 and was part of a pretty large family with its share of sad stories—his mom died when he was 6, all three of his sisters died, and one brother committed suicide shortly before he was to be executed for killing someone. He had two other two brothers: a lawyer and a textile merchant.

When Colt was 11, he worked for a farmer who had a copy of an encyclopedia that included articles about scientists and inventors—and about gunpowder. Needless to say, the stories stuck with him. It sounds like Colt became a bit of a firebug and amused himself with galvanic cells and setting off fireworks; he got himself kicked out of boarding school after starting a fire. Colt’s dad must have thought a career on the water would be advisable; he sent the kid off to apprentice on trade ships. While at sea and inspired by sea rigging, Colt got his idea for the revolver, which would allow repeated firing without reloading. When Colt came home in 1832, his dad financed production of a pistol and a rifle using this innovation. The pistol exploded; the rifle did OK. Dad was done with subsidizing his kid at that point, so Colt had to find other means of income and found it by hawking nitrous oxide as a “medicine man” in what sounds like a bit of a snake oil scheme, although I guess maybe he really believed in the drug’s restorative powers. This experience taught him a lot about sales—the obvious tenet that customers don’t want a textbook, they want a pulp novel.

But Colt’s first love remained guns and inventing, so when he has some cash, he went back to his gun studies and hired gunsmiths to work on his design. He was also pals with the superintendent of the U.S. Patent Office, who told him to get foreign patents first since a US patent would mean Colt couldn’t file for one in the UK. Colt spent 1835-1836 running around securing patents for his revolver, and then he went into production. Colt was an early proponent of assembly lines and interchangeable parts. In 1837, he was out of money again (making a lot of revolvers but not selling many), so he went back on the sales circuit but with little effect. He wanted to get a military contract (even in those days, it was big business), but he didn’t succeed. When he did sell some to Florida soldiers, the men were so intrigued by its weird design that they took a lot of the guns apart and broke them.

So Colt turned his attention elsewhere, selling underwater electrical detonators and waterproof cable he had invented. Working with Samuel B. Morse, his cable was used for underwater telegraph lines. (My husband writes about this brilliantly in America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion, and the Presidential Election That Transformed a Nation. Tell me if you want a copy; I can hook you up!)

Things started to pay off for Colt in 1847, when he got a contract to provide 1,000 revolvers to the Texas Rangers. And the rest, as they say, is history.  Colt’s firearms were used in the Mexican-American War, they were integral to the westward expansion. He sold guns to both the North and South in the runup to the Civil War. When he died in 1862, Colt was worth about $485 million in today’s US dollars. Almost 150 years later, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.